playing with toys and other hobbies a new piece 28/8/18

Playing with toys and other hobbies ©

By

Michael Casey

Some would say that Writing is my hobby, but that would be a cruel thing to say, it’s much more important to me than that. It’s not as important as breathing to me, I’m not pretentious after all, though some of you may be smiling. What I’m going to talk about tonight are others’ hobbies. I came to this choice as I’ve been having a relaxing day playing with stuff.

When a daughter gets a new phone a dad gets the old phone, even though he can barely understand how to use it, and his pork sausage fingers are too big to press and hold and keys or swipe things. And how does the swipe work anyway? It’s Black Magic. If you are very old you will remember Black Magic chocolates, though in today’s world it would be politically incorrect to use such word combinations. And then trading standards would complain because the description on the box was misleading, Harry Potter would complain.

Which brings me to what I’ve been doing today, I’ve been using the old phone as a music player. If you get a cheap HD chip you can backup your music collection to phone and then you have a high quality music player that has cost you nothing. Apart from the cost of a new phone that your daughter just had to have or she’d die of shame. Which means that you the dad have her old junk. But it’s still 10 times better that than brick the dad’s phone you use at present.

So more by luck than judgement or any skill whatsoever you blunder your way through the buttons or swipes. In anger you hurl it at the wall, and only then does the back come off, so you can insert you 2.99 30gig HD card inside. You thought 2.99 was robbery for such a tiny fingernail clipping. But it can store your lifetime of Barry Manilow albums, along with all your guilty musical secrets. So all you have to do now is to get the computer to recognise your old phone.

Two hours and 3 beer later you have worked it out, you did have to give 1/2 a glass of Stella Artois to your daughter’s gay best friend, he explained it in 10 seconds, and even pressed the right buttons on your windows 10 computer. He refused any more Stella Artois, as he did not want his mother to think his best friend’s dad was a drunken old sot, plying with drink. So now it was action stations. You can transfer all the Barry Manilow and Glad Rock onto your finger nail sized chip. So with Queen playing in the background, We Will Rock You, Rock You you start the xfers.

Only you drag and drop to the wrong place and end up having copies of copies of copies all over your hard drive. So you have to go and get a kebab to fortify you as you plod through all your music files tidying up. What you really need is a digital sheep dog that will guide your music collection onto the fingernail. A disc drive used to be as big as a washing machine I’ll have you know you drunkenly intone at the phone as the icon flashes at the bottom of the screen.  

A competent person would have sorted all this in an hour, even with so much Jim Reeves and all his darlings, and musical leftovers galore. But a dad, well a dad takes forever, and as any economist will tell you. Work expands to fit the time available. Rather like foreplay I imagine. Then end result is children, which complete the circle because it is they who gave you the old phone in the first place. And dos its sound any good? Yes a HD chip in an old phone does sound great. Though when the local dustman heard it, he did offer throw it in the back of his bin wagon, as he strode about with his Apple wireless in his ear as he emptied the bins.  

It’s all a question of taste and style, I still have a Toblerone shape speaker from the 1960s in the corner of my living room. My brothers listen to it when they were trying for Oxford and Cambridge. It still sounds great to my ears so I’m saving it, just in case anybody wants to swap it for an Apple thingy, or some other fruit. Though Oranges could be suggestive, suggestive of what I do not know. I am just an ordinary dad trying to salvage something for himself from his kids junk. I’ll finish now, I just remembered I need to trim my fingernails, I wonder could I use them as HD chips?